Hoping to cash in on the 'Cunningham' name

FRANKLY SPEAKING...

ABOUT FRANKFrank Mickadeit was born in Palo Alto on the last day of the winter that Buddy Holly died, grew up in Lompoc the oldest of seven children and went to college at San Diego State.

He got his first journalism job at age 16 as a part-time sportswriter at the Lompoc Record, working for Scott Ostler, who would later become a sports columnist at the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

After college, he worked at newspapers in San Diego County for five years before joining the Register staff in 1987. At the Register, he was a reporter from 1987-1992, and an editor supervising coverage of local, state and political news from 1992 to 2004. He began his daily column in August of 2004.

He lives in south county with his wife -- a PR type -- and their two terriers, Angie (a Scottie) and Clancy (a wire fox). His daughter is in law school.

Once one of our highest fliers, former Navy ace and disgraced congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham has fallen so far so fast I really didn't comprehend the totality of it until yesterday, when I drove to the warehouse where the U.S. government will auction off some of his ill-gotten gains this morning.

Cunningham didn't represent Orange County, and the auction is in L.A., but I found an O.C. angle to this saga in the person of Bill Cunningham . He works with me at the newspaper, and he hoped that some of the antiques and rugs Duke took as bribes in exchange for votes bear a Cunningham family crest or are otherwise embossed with their common last name.

Bill is no relation, just a complete opportunist.

For my part, I was hoping to find a huge, heavily leaded crystal ashtray mounted on a magnificent mahogany or walnut pedestal, so when I have friends over for a cigar and they admire the piece, I could take a long drag, slowly exhale and reveal its provenance. Yes, it belonged to Duke Cunningham. He traded for his vote on the F-22.

To preview the goods, Bill and I took the 405 to the 710 to some area of central L.A. I didn't even know existed.

We exited onto a rutted street that took us over a bridge that spanned a series of railroad tracks and gave us a spectacular view of rail yards and the massive warehouse district where Duke's stuff is to be sold off. That's when the enormity of Cunningham's downfall hit me.

"If we aren't in the ugliest place in Southern California," I told Bill, "we can at least see it from here."

Other than a silver Ferrari Modena, I must say Duke's stuff was the best. And of his 35 pieces, the best of it is the kind of thing you see in European castles and which sells for tens of thousands at top-end antique stores like George II on Glassell Street in Orange. There also were a few decent reproduction pieces and a few for which there's no word to describe them but crap .

There were other media hanging around, and Bill took full advantage of his last name, parlaying it into interviews with a "reporter" from Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" and a blond female reporter from a Russian TV network. As Bill fielded questions from the latter, he lounged on a sumptuous brown leather sofa that had belonged to the erstwhile congressman.

Alas, there were no monogrammed pieces and no ashtrays, but Bill and I have our eyes on a couple of other items (not the Ferrari) and plan to return this morning for the auction. Look for a follow-up report tomorrow.

Follow up

Remember little Jake Robert of Yorba Linda, the 4-year-old cerebral palsy victim who died in his sleep Jan. 9, the night after his father ran the O.C. Marathon on his behalf? The fund set up by his family in his name at United Cerebral Palsy-Orange County has brought in about $73,000, which agency officials consider pretty amazing.

Kathy Chennault , director of development, says Jake's parents, Steven and Alison , asked that some of the money go to help build an "inclusive" early education child-care center, which she describes as "a facility that will provide state-of-the-art child care to kids with disabilities as well as their typical peers."

The Robert family had hoped that Jake, whose death was completely unexpected, would someday get to play in such a center, which had been in the plans. With the influx of money, planning work has been accelerated, Chennault says. For more about the effort, go to www.ucp-oc.org.

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